I am a senior editor at Forbes, covering legal affairs, corporate finance, macroeconomics and the occasional sailing story. I was the Southwest Bureau manager for Forbes in Houston from 1999 to 2003, when I returned home to Connecticut for a Knight fellowship at Yale Law School. Before that I worked for Bloomberg Business News in Houston and the late, great Dallas Times Herald and Houston Post. While I am a Chartered Financial Analyst and have a year of law school under my belt, most of what I know about financial journalism, I learned in Texas.

Walter Wang was lying in Hong Kong’s Queen Mary Hospital, recovering from his second four-day session of chemotherapy for nasopharyngeal cancer that had burrowed distressingly close to his brain stem, when a strange giddiness overtook him. First he took out a piece of paper and started writing down the names of people he felt the need to forgive. Then he started laughing.

“I felt this energy rushing to my head and then my belly,” says Wang, the son of the late Y.C. Wang, once one of Taiwan’s richest men. “Then I felt this uncontrollable laughter–I’m laughing.”

“Walter’s a pretty serious guy–he’s not a jokester,” says his wife, Shirley. “And you see this guy shaking in the bed, rolling and laughing.”

It was perhaps fitting that Walter Wang would end up this way. His life has been a series of strange twists and turns as he has bounced between unimaginable wealth and near poverty, health and sickness, living under the thumb of a domineering billionaire father and building his own fortune around the unglamorous business of plastic piping.

Shirley and Walter Wang credit their Christian faith for his recovery from cancer. Walter’s forgiveness is being tested by a whistleblower suit against his company. (Photo credit: Tim Rue for Forbes)

Wang survived his 2005 bout with cancer–he and Shirley credit their renewed Christian faith, and even the controversial practice of speaking in tongues–but the billion-dollar business he bought from his father that year, JM Eagle, is still under a cloud. As he was enduring chemotherapy in a Hong Kong hospital, Wang was being dragged into that peculiarly American form of torture known as a whistleblower lawsuit. A disgruntled engineer had gotten in league with Phillips & Cohen, a Washington law firm specializing in such suits, removed files from his company’s computers and in January 2006 filed papers accusing Wang’s company, then known as J-M Manufacturing, of selling billions of dollars’ worth of defective pipe to states and municipalities around the U.S.

It’s a strange lawsuit, not least because a Los Angeles jury found JM Eagle, now the world’s largest manufacturer of PVC pipe, liable for failing to make 100% of its pipe according to Underwriters Laboratories standards even though a UL engineer testified that the company never fell out of compliance. Armed with that verdict, the Phillips & Cohen lawyers are seeking hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in damages.

Walter Wang, 49, is confident he can beat this, too. He spent his earliest years in luxury in Taiwan, the youngest of Y.C. Wang’s five children by Wang Yang Chiao, one of three women Y.C. lived with over his 91-year life. The son of a poor tea farmer, Y.C. never made it to high school but displayed an entrepreneurial streak in Japanese-occupied Taiwan in the 1930s, selling rice and then building a profitable timber business. In 1954 he used a $798,000 grant from the U.S. government to get into the then new plastics industry.

Walter says Y.C. went into plastics because of his second-rank connections with the Chiang Kai-shek government, when friends and relatives took over the island’s most lucrative businesses after the war. “There was one very strange category left, and that was called plastics,” Wang says, laughing. “They knew my father had a lot of cash from the lumber business, so they pushed him to take it.”

Y.C. Wang quickly realized he wouldn’t sell much plastic resin in Taiwan without manufacturers to buy it. So he recruited friends to start downstream businesses making plastic toys and other inexpensive export products that introduced a generation of Americans to the phrase “Made In Taiwan.”

It’s a strategy the elder Wang pursued for the rest of his career: Build the downstream first. “PVC pipe uses a lot of plastic resin,” Walter Wang says, so it made sense for Formosa to buy the pipe business of bankrupt asbestos manufacturer Johns Manville in 1982 as a way of expanding into the U.S. market.

While Y.C. Wang was building a $6 billion-plus fortune, his domestic life was descending into chaos. He married only once, to Yueh-Lan, in 1935. But the woman known as “Big Mother” remained childless, so he took up with Wang Yang Chiao, living in a mansion in Taipei with both women and a growing number of children. Later he started spending nights with a third woman, a former bar hostess named Pao Chu Lee, with whom he’d have another four kids.

“There was a lot of strife in the family, too many women,” Walter says. When Walter was 9 his mother packed him for a move to Berkeley, California, where his older sister Cher was attending the University of California.

Walter and his mother moved into a $50,000 house on Marin Avenue that she bought with savings and her daughters’ wedding dowries. They lived on a small monthly allowance Y.C. sent them, Walter says. Walter sold plastic models he’d built door-to-door to raise extra cash, and he and his sister Cher managed to pry a new car out of their billionaire father only after subjecting Y.C.’s younger brother, Yung-Tsai, to a ride in their dangerously ill-maintained junker across the San Francisco Bay Bridge.

After a few semesters at UC Berkeley Walter left to work for his dad in Taiwan in 1988. He met his wife Shirley in 1990 while toiling at a $700-a-month job at Formosa. A UCLA marketing major who’d grown up in the U.S. and Taiwan, she was unimpressed at first.

“In Taiwan they had a saying about arrogant, rich people, ‘Who do you think you are? Y.C. Wang’s son?’” Shirley says. “But in reality he had no car.”

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Walter Wang lived in “near poverty;” here poverty is relative term I think. Poor people do become rich, but very rich people, no matter how reduced their circumstances, rarely become truly poor. They simply have too many rich friends and good connections to ever really slum it.